*The title is possibly a reference to ''{{w|The Star Wars Holiday Special}}''.

*The title is possibly a reference to ''{{w|The Star Wars Holiday Special}}''.

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*The episode being "brought to you by [[Gunderson's Unshelled Nuts]]" parodies many Christmas specials from the 1950s and 1960s, such as ''{{w|Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (TV special)|Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer}}'' and ''{{w|A Charlie Brown Christmas}}'', where the advertisers would prominently announce their sponsorship within the special itself.

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*The episode being "brought to you by [[Gunderson's Unshelled Nuts]]" parodies many Christmas specials from the [[1950s]] and [[1960s]], such as ''{{w|Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (TV special)|Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer}}'' and ''{{w|A Charlie Brown Christmas}}'', where the advertisers would prominently announce their sponsorship within the special itself.

Plot

Openings

It's Xmas Day again, and the Planet Express crew are preparing for the imminent attack from Robot Santa Claus. Fry begins to feel depressed that Xmas just isn't like the way he used to celebrate Christmas, but he can't quite understand what is missing. Suddenly, Santa bursts in through the fireplace and answers his question, in song: what they are missing is an old-fashioned pine tree. He then kills Scruffy and leaves. The crew realize that Santa was right, and they need to bring pine trees back from extinction, just like they did with the barking snakes. They go to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to find some pine seeds. The crew are taken in by the Norwegian seed guard, who gives them a handful of seeds, and tells them about the Fifty-Year Squirts. However, the pine seeds that they take were contaminated with germs from the nearby Germ Warfare Repository, but they do not take this into consideration.

Fry plants the seeds in the dirt near the Planet Express headquarters. By Xmas next year, it has grown into a small tree. Dick Cheney's head sees it, and, as the Vice-President of Earth, commands Richard Nixon's head, the President of Earth, to steal the tree. Nixon replants the tree at the White House and they have an annual tree lighting. However, as soon as the tree is lit, it grows immensely. The Norwegian seed guard admits that it may have been the germs, and the tree begins to fire its pine cones off of itself and into the soil with an explosion. A tree grows from everyone of those cones, and eventually, the entire planet Earth is covered in coniferous forests. The crew are optimistic about the positive environmental impact at first, but then the Professor and Al Gore's head discover that the oxygen level in the atmosphere is dangerously high at eighty percent. Bender lights a cigar and the entire atmosphere of Earth burns up, killing billions. In space, Santa flies by in his sleigh, as if he orchestrated the entire event in order to kill everyone on Earth. He then pleasantly tells us to stay tuned for the next segment.

It's the end of the Xmas break, and the Planet Express crew is about to destroy the gifts that they forgot to deliver. Bender begins to complain that only the Human holidays are celebrated by them, but a Robot holiday, like Robanukah, a day Bender made up so he could get out of work (1ACV05), isn't. He manages to convince them, in song, to let him celebrate Robanukah by not working, and watching two Fembots named Ruth and Esther wrestle in petroleum oil. However, Bender discovers that the referee, a monkey named Abraham, only has enough oil for Ruth and Esther to wrestle for four and a half weeks, when Robanukah is supposed to last for six and a half weeks. When he goes to buy more at a Mombil gas station, Sal's friend informs them that the Earth has ran dry of petroleum oil. Since Ruth and Esther won't wrestle without oil, Bender makes the Professor install a huge drill to the front of the Planet Express ship and drill a tunnel deep into Earth to find a small amount.

Along the way, they are attacked by an albino humping worm, which humps the ship. They manage to escape it and drill even deeper. As the ship continues to fall apart, and the heat rises, the crew gets more and more annoyed at being forced to risk their lives just for Bender. Bender gets mad at their disrespect for the robot tradition, but then part of the ship caves in and crushes all of the crew except for Bender. The ship ends up destroyed, and jammed in the tunnel, more than two hundred kilometers underground. Five hundred million years later, Bender is still in the ship. He has been relaxing in the side of it that wasn't destroyed. Bender begins to miss the others, but then realizes that over the millions of years, the crew turned into petroleum oil. He collects some and drills back to the surface with his head, where all of New New York has turned into desert, except for the Planet Express building. He walks in to give the Fembots his oil, but is surprised to find out that the oil that was supposed to last for four and a half weeks had lasted five hundred million years, and that Ruth and Esther were wrestling all this time. Bender proclaims it a Robanukah miracle.

They fly to the bees' Space Hive, equip Bender with a trans-bumblator and cautiously enter. Inside, they discover that the bees there are also suffering from the same parasites. The Space Bee Queen explains to them that the parasites have been making her children fight with each other, and create chaos in the hive. Although they got enough wax, Hermes thinks that the right thing to do would be to help the Queen restore order by explaining the principles of Kwanzaa. They are successful, and the parasites die. However, now that the bees are back to normal, they go back to attacking the Planet Express crew. Kwanzaa-bot reappears to help them, but is then killed by the bees. The crew end up covered in wax and slowly burning to death as the bees use them as candles.

Closing

A curtain comes down and Al Gore's head informs the audience that the crew will be back with new episodes next year, with him as Captain Lance Starman. Amy comes in wearing a Gunderson's Nuts costume, for one last piece of advertisement.

Reception

In its original American broadcast, the episode was viewed by an estimated 1.302 million households.[2] The rest of the broadcast season had about 1.9 million viewers, but it should also be noted that The Futurama Holiday Spectacular was aired between seasons.

Additional Info

Lyrics

Trivia

This is the first episode to feature the name of the series in its title.

This is the first non-canon episode to not feature the What-If Machine and therefore, unlike the ones that did feature it, has no canon story components. Basically, it is the only Futurama episode that is entirely non-canon.

Continuity

The way the cake house is destroyed during the Xmas Song is reminiscent to the way the house where Enos Fry dies is destroyed (3ACV19). As mentioned above, this references famous atomic bomb test footage.

In the shot where pine trees are springing all around Earth, we can see our planet is turning in the wrong direction. (6ACV08)

Even though it is clear from the first seasonal episode (2ACV04) that Zoidberg is on Santa's good list, he still gets attacked.

Probably because of Zoidberg snipping the Xmas lights that incapacitate Robot Santa in that episode.

A Space Bee asks another if he's black with yellow stripes or yellow with black stripes. This echoes a question Smitty asked URL, if the penguins on Pluto were black with white feathers or white with black feathers (3ACV05).

Goofs

When Kwanzaa-bot was rapping, the beat played throughout the whole song, even when they stopped playing the instruments.

Also, During Kwanzaa-bot's rap, he mentions Xmas and Robanukah. Robanukah was apparently a made-up Holiday by Bender.

He could have convinced Kwanzaa-bot that Robanukah was a real Holiday.

Last time we heard of Robanukah (1ACV05), it had been only two weeks long and had different traditions when celebrated in the ship.

Given that Bender made up Robanukah to skip work, the different traditions can be explained as being whatever Bender felt was good at the time. The addition of four and a half weeks can be explained in this manner. Bender added several weeks to Robanukah because he wanted more time to drink and party.

When the droidel landed on Shin (ש), Bender took all the coins, but, in the actual game, this letter either means to give in two coins or half your coins, and in neither version of it do you give them to another player.

Given that Bender is making this holiday up out of pure self-interest, we have no reason to believe that he would play with any regard for the actual rules of the game.

Bender's Robanukah has nothing to do with the actual Hanukkah miracles, but the droidel still has a Nun (נ), Gimel (ג), He (ה), and Shin (ש) on it, which stands for Nes Gadol Hayah Sham. "A big miracle happened there".

Bender barely had time to make the traditions of the holiday up. He probably just chose the signs of a normal dreidel.

Fry probably shouldn't have knowledge of the deadly silent Prius, seeing as he was frozen in 2000.

Priuses in the time interim may have become something else. Or he does actual research.

Bender has been on for 500 million years without beer, but he has no rust.

Farnsworth: Good news! All these pine trees are fighting global warming by producing oxygen. Happy now, Gore?Al Gore: Yeah. But I'd be happier if I had a set of lungs.

Leela: [Repeated line.] This could be a good thing.

Zoidberg: What's that loud, boring sound you'll hear when I stop talking?Farnsworth: [He gasps.] It's an albino humping worm!Fry: Why do they call it that?Farnsworth: [The ship begins to rock back and forth.] Because it doesn't have any pigment.